The Megyn Kelly Show - The D.C. Sniper: A Megyn Kelly Show True Crime Special | Ep. 343

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

It's a "D.C. Sniper" episode of The Megyn Kelly Show's Hot Crime Summer week. Megyn Kelly is joined by Jim Clemente, former FBI profiler and co-host of Real Crime Profile, to talk about the disturbing D.C. sniper killings, the connection to 9/11 and the terror people felt in the early days after the attack, the nature of sniper killers, how to remember details in traumatic events, how they determined the killer had a "God complex," the "psychopath checklist," the chilling messages left from the sniper, how the profiler was able to determine it was a duo, the actual motive in the case, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today we are looking back at one of the most chilling shooting sprees in our nation's history. It was just over one year after 9-11, and for three weeks in October of 2002, the D.C. area was under siege. No one, no one, it seemed, was safe. Attacks targeted people from every walk of life doing the most common of tasks, pumping gas, shopping, mowing the lawn, just walking, just walking down the street. At first, law enforcement thought the shooter was likely a white, older man, perhaps with military experience. But as they pieced

together the clues, the reality was much different. Today, we are going to take a fascinating look into the Beltway Sniper case, and we are thrilled to be joined by someone who was working for the FBI at that time. Jim Clemente is truly a living legend whose own personal story is also fascinating. He's a former FBI profiler who went on to bring his expertise to the small screen and now has a number of exciting projects that we'll get into in a bit. Jim Clemente, welcome to the show. Very great to be here. I really appreciate all the work that you do, getting out all this amazing true crime.

Oh, Jim, thank you for saying that. From you, that's a great compliment, because I know you've devoted your life to catching bad guys and talking about it and helping people understand the process and how it's done. I've learned from you and our listeners and viewers are about to as well, if they haven't caught your work yet. This case, I remember this so well, I was just about to move to the DC area. And so I was watching it with great interest and thankfully had not yet gotten there. But the thing that was just so terrifying about it was there was no way of preventing, other than staying in your house all day and not doing any of the normal things you would do. There was absolutely no way of preventing it from happening to you because like I say, it could literally have been, you were just walking down the street

that there was no method. It seemed to how they chose their victims. Yeah. There was a very random process going on. And with snipers, that's generally the case. Snipers will actually have absolutely no relationship to their victims. They actually choose a method of operation that distances themselves from their victims. They want to feel like God taking life from afar and above. And because of that, they typically pick random victims that just happen into their purview. But in that case, when that was going on, there were so many people who were putting up double blankets over all their windows in their houses, who were, when they had to go to the grocery store, were pulling up right next to the front or actually crawl walking into the grocery stores, or while they're getting gas. It was a terrifying time in that whole Washington, D.C. area. It's not like today, you know, when post-COVID ordering your groceries is not uncommon. People

know how to do that. They know how to do most things without leaving their house. The world has now been set up to allow that back then you had to leave the house you had to correct go outside you know and it was like places like michael's you know who hasn't been to michael's you know to go get whatever a baking tray for the holiday cookies you're making something home depot exactly or your gas you know it's like i i read too and i didn't remember this from the time but they some gas station owners were setting up big tarps around the area where you'd pump your gas so that you could feel confident no one would shoot you. That it was a month of hell. It was.

It was the most direct, horrific, terroristic event since 9-11. And it was seen as, since it was within a year of when 9-11 happened, it was seen as potentially an extension of 9-11. People thought that this could be some outside terrorist who was running amok in the Washington, D.C. area, particularly because D.C. is such a political place. And all these shootings happened right around D.C. area, particularly because D.C. is such a political place. And all these shootings happened right around D.C. and even right into D.C. And those things got people worried, especially people in the FBI. Yeah. I remember it was like the three things, not to compare, because 9-11 is in a class of its own, but we suffered that terrorist attack. Then the anthrax scare came. And then within 12 months or so, we're looking at the DC sniper attacks, these seemingly

at random. And people may remember 10 people died, but 20 people were shot. I mean, 13 as part of that one month, but it actually wound up going well beyond that, which we'll get to. Well beyond, yeah. So it truly was terror, events of terror back then. And people wonder why now, at the benefit of hindsight, we submitted to the security state, how the expansion of all these programs and spying and so on. We were scared.

Yeah, well, we were vulnerable and we had to do something as a country to sort of counteract that. I think 9-11 taught us not only that we were vulnerable, but that we were extremely lucky because that attack could have killed upwards of hundreds of thousands of people. And to lose 3,000 lives on that day was horrific. And I'll never forget it. But the fact is there were 150,000 people working in the World Trade Center alone, and if one of those towers had fallen sideways instead of just collapsing on itself, we don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people could have been killed. You just gave me the chills.

You're so right. But I do remember that feeling of being terrorized. And in a way, the DC sniper brought it out in people even more than 9-11. 9-11 seemed so extraordinary. I don't know that we were worrying that that would happen regularly. It was such an extraordinary attack by this man we understood far away in a cave in Afghanistan. It took extraordinary amounts of planning and so on. But the DC sniper was getting person after person after person, day after day after day, and very few clues to go on. It's not like, we think we got him or there's someone in custody. It took almost the whole month before it was like, okay, so let's start at the beginning. Let's start at the beginning.

Okay. Um, the first, the first, and we can then go back. Let's just do the ones that we experienced as a nation together. Uh, those 13 shootings,

10 of which resulted in fatalities first. And then we can go back and take a look at what was happening prior to that spree which helps put everything into perspective okay i'm trying to get my dates in front of me the first one october 2nd 2002 55 year old james d martin a program analyst for the national oceanic and atmospheric administration is shot in the parking lot of Shopper's Food Warehouse in Wheaton, Maryland. Now, at that point, what did we know? Did we know this is like a killing for joy?

You know what I mean? Did we think he had enemies? What was known? At this point, there was obviously a big question mark. Was he singled out because of his job? He worked for the government. I mean, at least a government entity. And because of that, we weren't sure whether this was to do a deep dive on victimology. We have to understand who this person is. And right at the beginning, his job stood out as something that could be related to some kind of terroristic government attack. As it turns out, in a very short period of time, all hell would break loose. And it would soon become clear. We're talking about a small town in a county that literally never sees this kind of violent crime when basically in one day their murder rate is multiplied by 50%. Yeah.

Their entire year they get in one day. So in the beginning, you're thinking, like you say, is it something to do with his job? What is it? Let's look into all of that. But that lasted about 24 hours as far as I can see. I mean, it was less than a day before the next crime took place. That was of a 39-year-old man, landscaper named James L. Buchanan. Police were called to the crime scene. They found him. He'd been fatally shot while mowing a lawn

at a commercial establishment near Rockville, Maryland. So now, I mean, at least one of the other clues here is this isn't about class, right? Now you've got somebody who's probably more professionally educated. Now you've got a different guy who mows lawns for a living. Both men, one's almost 40, one's 55, and not, I don't know, but Rockville, Maryland versus Wheaton, Maryland, not too far away, right? They're not too far. They're neighboring towns, but, but the thing about it is that we didn't know right away that these were related.

We had to, I mean, ballistics is what actually created that connection, but it took a little while to get the bullets from both of these victims and to match them to the same being fired from the same weapon. The fact is that when Buchanan's body was found, it was it looked like it was an accident. He was mowing lawn. It looked like maybe a rock kicked up or some glass kicked up and struck him. But then it was determined that he was actually shot. And so now we have two shootings within a fairly short geographic distance in both in towns where there wasn't a lot of shootings. So there's some connection being drawn at this point. The FBI is not involved at this point yet. It's a local

police matter. The Montgomery County Police Department or Montgomery County Sheriff's Department was brought in immediately. And at that point, they were they had. I think they had just a handful of detectives working for them. And of course, these detectives would have to go from one scene to the next. And of course, normally, they would get one shooting every several months. And now they have two shootings within 24 hours, 27 hours, maybe. Do you remember whether there were eyewitnesses this early? I imagine they'd be asking, did anybody see anything? Did anybody see anything? Did anybody have something to report on how it went down? There were a lot of people interviewed. And the problem here in this case at this time is that whoever the shooter is, he's a ghost.

Nobody sees him. Nobody heard exactly where the shot came from. In the case of the second shooting, they didn't even of fill in blanks that they don't really have in their memory. They will do this either intentionally or unintentionally. And this can cause an investigation to go off on tangents and actually really impede a thorough and quick investigation. And we will start to see that very shortly as these shootings keep continuing. I'm recalling this story of a law school professor who got to class late, said, so sorry, had a road rage incident, lunatic on the street. I'm fine. Let's move on. About 10 minutes minutes later somebody shows up frothing at the mouth at the classroom door banging on the door threatening threatening finally the guy comes

in has a gun this is back when i was in law school so you know early 90s before we were you know crazy about you know matt this is a mass shooting there's a mass shooting there's a mass shooting um pulls out a gun everybody says ah some people get down um some people cower people scream uh before everybody had a cell phone and the professor keeps yelling the guy runs out the you know the intruder runs out the professor goes to run after him comes back into the classroom minutes later hands out a form to everybody in the classroom and says write down everything you remember about the about the intruder it was all a farce and today you would get sued by every single student in that class today you would but it's a great teaching experiment because it's a social experiment, really.

But what it is, is trying to demonstrate the fallacy that eyewitness testimony is actually accurate. We do exactly the same thing in the FBI Academy and the FBI National Academy. We actually stage, though, actual bank robberies, for example, for our students to witness. And they're there on site. And you'll have 50 students, either new agent trainees or advanced police trainees, who are witnessing exactly the same event. And then we do sort of a chart, a flow chart of all the different answers. How many shots were fired? What color was the vehicle? How many people in the vehicle? How long were they in the bank? How long

did they shoot when they came out? How many shots were fired then? All of these details. And you will see that they're all over the place. But then we teach people, these people who professionally have to be able to recount details very well, how to focus and how to weed out all the other aspects that can distract you. Because when you're involved in a life situation and then a violent crime happens in front of you, you didn't expect it to happen. You were expecting to take notes or to go to the store or to pick up your daughter from school and something else intervene. But all those other things are still distracting you. Right. So that's the next level for anybody training to be basically in your job, which is to learn to use all that adrenaline for good to pay hyper attention.

Yes, to focus. And I remember my colleague, we wound up practicing law together and she used to be a nurse before she went to law school. And so this had happened to her in her law school. And it was a great, because somebody else was there who had witnessed her behavior. And they were telling me that she, her name was Sandy, unlike virtually everybody in the class, having been a nurse, was used to trauma situations. And so while like some of the big male burly guys in the class were underneath their desks, she was like, you over there, there was a guy in a wheelchair near the front door. She's like, get him away from that front door. You move there, you move this. She totally took

command. This is, you know, dimin know diminutive like she had special forces training she just she'd been through trauma and of course the point of the story is their eyewitness identifications were horrible horrible you know it's like man wearing a big yellow morton salt jacket man wearing lumberjack you know shirt a woman some people said it was a woman. It's so unreliable. So yes, to your point, the eyewitness IDs, you can't put that much stock in them unless you get the miracle of, holy cow, they're all identical. They really did get a look at this person. Well, and again, it's going to be a filtering out process. And that's what we do when we do all these mass interviews, when we're when we're doing sort of neighborhood canvases and so forth.

We want to ask exactly the same questions and then we can measure the answers against each other. If you don't have a form for that and every officer is out asking different questions, you can never really find out which people are telling the truth and which people aren't. And again, it might be unintentional. In other words, some people believe that they are actually recounting what happened. But what happens is memory is not a digital video of this event. Memory is stored in several different areas. Each one of your senses has the ability to store information from a memory in a different part of your brain. And in order to remember it, you have to pull those pieces together. If there's a piece missing, if you don't remember what it sounded like or what somebody looked like or how tall somebody was, your brain will fill in what

you expect. And if you're focusing only on that gun, which many times people say that gun barrel looked massive when the gun was pointing at them, and it focuses your attention on that and away from the features of the person that are right in front of you. But we've developed ways of actually maximizing the ability of somebody to you. But we've developed ways of actually maximizing the ability of somebody to recall things. Really? Actually, yeah, we've developed cognitive interviewing. And basically, it's a way to get people to relax and to put themselves back into the situation in a non-threatening way. And then we engage all of their senses, not just their sight and sound.

Most people will recount events through sight and sound, but they won't tell you what the temperature was like on that day, what smells came into their nose while this was happening. Smells are big. But if you bring those things back, it's like linking up a chain in your brain to all the different parts of your memory

and you can pull them out more easily. So we try to do that without any suggestion, but we do certain techniques to get people to think about it. One of the ways is to get them to tell us what happened the first thing in the morning and go detail by detail what they did that morning. So by the time they get to the event, their brain is already used to recounting a lot of detail. And again, getting all that sensory information involved just ramps up the ability of somebody to remember something. For example, if I said,

tell me about Thanksgiving at your home when you were a kid, one of the first things you'll remember is the family being together, the smells of the turkey cooking, everybody being together, the mood, the ambience, how people were situated around the table. All those kinds of things will help you have a much more rich experience when you try to recall that. And that's what we try to do about crimes too. That's good stuff. I mean, who hasn't had the experience of you, they're out of your deodorant when you're at the store. So you get something that's a one-off. And then when you put it on, you're like, oh, summer 1986. It's like you don't necessarily know the date, but you know you've had

it before. And just the smell takes you back to that place. Yeah. Your smell, your sense of smell is the most directly wired to your brain. There's only one synapse between the nerves that end coming from your nose and getting to your brain. So because of that, it's one of the most incredible ways to recall something just by smell. Now, this is a fascinating side journey. We could do a whole show just on this. All right. So back to the DC. Unfortunately, we have to get back to murder. Yeah. Back to the DC sniper. So you mentioned ballistics. So how long does it take to get the I mean, in a situation like that, where now we've had a shooting on October 2nd and the very next day, James L. Buchanan,

the 39-year-old landscaper, gets shot. Could you possibly have much information on the ballistics that quickly? Not yet. First of all, they're two different towns. And then the shootings happened, the first six shootings happened within 27 hours. So it wasn't literally till towards the end of that 27 hours that we started to get information that these were all, they all seem to be a ballistic match. And then that was confirmed shortly thereafter. But when you start seeing then shooting after shooting, you can start, because it's such an anomaly in this area, to have a sniper shooting. In other words, there were shootings in this county, but these shootings were typically with a handgun by someone who was right in front of the person. And there is some kind of ongoing dispute or a robbery going bad, an armed robbery going bad. This kind of shooting where there's a sniper who is

completely distanced and invisible to everybody, that is something that's a very unique thing. And just that behavior in and of itself started to link these crimes by MO. So we talked about the first two. October 3rd was the big day. There was just the one on October 2nd, though, right before that first killing, there had been a shot fired through a window at Michael's craft store in Asakar, 52, a part-time cab driver, killed while pumping gas in the Aspen Hill area of Montgomery County, Maryland. Again, that's where that Michaels was. That's number three. Then October 4, October 3rd, again, Sarah Ramos, 34. Now it's a woman, Silver Spring, Maryland, killed at a post office.

A witness reports seeing a white van or a truck speed away from the post office parking lot immediately after the shooting. And we'll get back to that white van in one second. Then comes number five, October 3rd, still. Lorianne Lewis Rivera, 25. Again, now we're on to young women. Silver Spring, Maryland, shot dead at a Shell gas station in Kensington. And then number six, October 3rd, 2002, this is the only one in Washington, D.C., Pascal Charlotte, 72 years old, shot in the chest as he just walked down Georgia Avenue, taken to a hospital where he dies less than an hour later.

That last one, number six, the first shooting to occur at night. The others, I had forgotten about this, were all in broad daylight. That's crazy. Exactly. It is crazy. And what it does is it tells us immediately as profilers that the person who did this had a high level of criminal sophistication. And what does that mean? Well, it means he knows how to plan and execute his crimes. Another thing that we saw, now you have six shots, six kills within 27 hours, a very tight timeframe. Generally, this kind of shooting would be labeled a spree. In other words, an offender who is going off and just killing as many people as he or she can in a row. But generally, when we see that, when we have a shooting spree, we see some level of decompensation in the shooter, in his

skills, in his planning. Things just don't go according to plan and things start falling apart. He might have to carjack somebody's car to get away. He might have to shoot out with the police or somebody else who pulls a gun on him. None of that happened here. So we felt that this offender, while he was certainly in, had to be in his late 30s or early 40s, at least that he had some kind of military or police training and experience. targets. Because when you're shooting at human beings, when you actually take a life, that actually takes a certain kind of individual. And somebody who's doing that and is not rattled by it, that's somebody who's done it before. And like you said about your nurse in the example in law school, she had gone through trauma, which is why she could remain calm. And I mentioned about special forces training. They put you through every possible horrible scenario and anything that could go wrong and things blowing up all around you so that when you're in special forces and you're in a firefight, you actually calm down.

You actually can see things that other people can't even see because they're focused on all the bangs and the bullets and the explosions while you are focused on what you need to do to survive this and stop the threat. So we have just in that first day, a tremendous amount of information. One, a sniper. He chose his weapon. He chose this weapon because he wanted to feel like God. He wanted to feel omnipotent. He wanted to feel like he could take a life from afar and above and nobody can stop him. And he chooses when their lives ended. And that that came out because these random victims who couldn't have been planned. In other words, some of them had just as a fluke, sat down on a bench or just decided to go to the post office, that kind of thing. You can't

actually know that this person is going to be at that place at that time. And so when we put all that together, the random victimology, the sniper, the fact that he had not decompensated at all. We really thought we were looking for somebody who had to be at least in his late 30s, maybe early 40s, and experienced the line of fire before. Why the late 30s and 40s? I understand the possible ex-military, but why late 30s and 40s? Well, because the the calm, cool, collected manner in which he planned and executed perfectly these crimes. or even 30s that the person wouldn't have had the level of experience necessary to actually kill that many people and never make a mistake and never be seen. It's weird, but it's like they wouldn't have had the maturity is basically what you're saying.

Exactly. Because what happens is when profiling is nothing more than reverse engineering a crime. And so we look at the behavior exhibited at a crime scene and work backwards to the type of person who committed that crime. Of course, victimology is the first thing we look at. Who are they picking as their victims? If they're picking people who are out on the street late at night, street workers, you know, sex workers, drug addicts, runaways. Those are easy pickings. Nobody is looking for them. Nobody's protecting them. They're out on their own and they're putting themselves in a very risky situation. I'm not judging them, just telling you how risky it is. But if he's shooting people in the privacy and security of their own homes, what does that tell

you? He has to have a higher sophistication level. He has to get to people where they are most safe. And he's doing almost that. He's shooting people in broad daylight in the normal course of their life with literally hundreds, if not thousands, of potential eyewitnesses. How is he doing that?

How is he doing that and nobody is he doing that? And nobody's seen him. And you mentioned the white van. Yeah, yeah. Wait, hold on on that one for one second. I know that we have more on the God complex later, but what was it at that point that suggested to you that this person may have one? The reason why we theorize that he had a God complex is because of his choice of weapon in crime. His M.O. screams out God complex. We have studied all the other sniper cases in the history of the U.S. And we have seen their psychology. And the way I always like to explain it, I break it down this way.

That genetics loads the gun, personality and psychology aim it, and your experiences pull the trigger. And that means it's a complicated mix of bio, psycho, and social that actually makes someone into a killer. In other words, they have to have the genetic predisposition, or at least potentiality to be a killer. They have their own personality and psychology, which is the filter through which they then experience life's experiences. So that becomes the critical part. Because you develop your own personality and psychology. You start with a certain basis, but you make literally in your life tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands

of private little decisions in the privacy of your own mind. And those decisions about when you come into conflict with someone, are you going to sort of try to push away from the negative or are you going to embrace the dark side? Are you going to actually just give into it and in fact, do everything you can to do bad things for the rest of your life? What happens is these little choices that we make when we're very young then become bigger choices. And there are times in your life where you can get off that road and correct. But if you don't, it has this snowball effect that by the time you're in your 20s and if you're impulsive, you may act out very badly. If you're in your 30s,

you will think about it more. If you're in your 30s, you will think about it more. If you're in your 40s, you will plan it very carefully and execute it very well. A lot of people can plan things, but they typically fall apart unless you've had a tremendous amount of experience doing that thing. So that's why we felt in this case that he was older. And the fact that he chose out of all the weapons he could have chosen somebody as sophisticated as this. He chooses a sniper rifle at a distance because he wants to feel powerful. This empowers him by taking the lives of others. And this is something that we've learned from interviewing long, detailed interviews with other snipers, people who have been successful, and people who have been stopped before they've killed anyone. What is it about that kind of a weapon and

killing somebody from a distance with a sniper rifle that is meaningful to them, the challenge of it? Well, there is a certain challenge of it, but they see it as a way to be godlike. You know, everybody thinks of God up in heaven and God decides when somebody lives or dies, right? So that's what they're doing. They're sort of assuming the role of God. They're superimposing that on people. They want to cause the fear and terror that they successfully did in the entire Washington, D.C statement saying, I want this much money. I will stop if you do that. He was trying to engender terror by not letting anybody feel like they were safe. And so all the parents were worried about sending their kids to school, all the people that had to go to work, all spree the way he did. How would somebody

being a sociopath factor in? Could a sociopath who is 22 have that same calmness that just a crazed killer might have at age 42? Right. Well, first of all, sociopathies, a sociopath is a diagnosis. It's a psychological diagnosis. It's in the DSM and you have to actually do tests to diagnose a person like that. Instead, in law enforcement, we do indirect personality assessments. And we talk about psychopathy instead. Psychopathy, the disorder that leads, that means somebody is a psychopath, is based on what Dr. Robert Hare put together. He put together the PCLR, the psychopathy, excuse me, the psychopathy checklist revised, which has 20 different aspects that make it up. And what you do is you rate someone a zero if they don't have this trait, a one if they kind of had this trait, and a two if they definitely have this trait. And it's things like narcissism and getting in trouble when they're kids and things like that.

Multiple marriages, a lot of problems in their life. But if you score more than 30, you're classified as a psychopath. If you score more than 20, a lot of people think you're probably there or almost there. But one of the things that, one of the most prevalent traits in psychopaths is a lack of human empathy. Now, what does that mean? What is empathy? It's our ability to put ourselves in other people's shoes and feel bad about them when they go through bad things. And it's one of the things that helps prevent us from hurting people and being violent. This is a sort of a survival mechanism that our brain puts in front of. It's sort of our frontal lobe.

It's our policeman. It basically says, stop before you go too far. And many psychopaths have none of that at all. They are completely devoid of empathy, and many of them are completely devoid of human emotion. Now, the smart ones can see it in other people, and they can mimic it. Learn to fake it.

Right. Fake it very well, and that's what they use to manipulate people. Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy is a great example. Also, I don't really love giving names of people that are bad. I work for the victims, not for the bad guys. But Bandersloot, the guy who killed Natalie Holloway, and also the daughter of a South American race car driver and on the five year him on the anniversary and he ends up killing her but what

he does is he walks out of the hotel room with two empty coffee cups goes and gets coffee and comes back to quote discover her dead immediately after killing her he recovers comes up with a plan if i go out and look and carry two cups i I can say I thought she was still alive. She was alive when I left. And when I came back, I found her dead. He's immediately trying to build an alibi. there was a camera literally right outside his hotel room door and nobody went in or out after he left. And so they were very easily able to break through that alibi. But the important thing is that psychopaths have the ability to recover quickly. They actually live for thrills. So they're exciting people to be around, for example. But in this case, we saw the fact that he was able to do this in a cold, calculated manner as not only confirming that he was probably going to be high on the psychopathy checklist, but also confirming that he had experience doing exactly this somewhere in his life. We need that checklist posted in the show notes so that young women dating can just quietly drop these questions. Can't do it all at once, ladies. It's two on the nose. But you know, just like over the first date, you could maybe squeeze in two, you know,

second date, have like a friend show up and ask a few. There must be a way of peppering these if your instincts haven't served you well. I would be a little cautious about it just because people who haven't done this thousands of times can sort of misinterpret behavior. There's a lot of things that people, a lot of little traits or characteristics of psychological disorders, minor characteristics of them that we all have. But people can see those minor characteristics and think it means everything in the diagnostic category, and they could be wrong that way. Although we actually did a show for Audible, and it's called Am I Dating a Serial Killer? I wanted to ask you about that.

And believe me, when when, you know, some of it's kind of lighthearted and it's hosted by a comedian. So we try to be get to the lighter side of it. But there was one case in particular where they called me in to interview this woman because I believe she was dating a psychopath. I believe that he was a very dangerous person. And in fact, he did end up killing someone. So you should be incredibly careful when you meet somebody new, because especially somebody who is charming, charismatic and energetic and has all these amazing stories, you should kind of dig down and meet their friends and their families. And if they say, well, I don't really talk to my family, big red flag. If they say, well, I don't have a lot of friends, big red flag. There are, you know, if you look at, let's say, the Tinder swindler, that guy.

I mean, when he did his thing, he made women feel incredibly special. He flew them on a private jet. He did all these amazing things, all these gifts. He said his life was totally consumed by them. Well, it's all a very well planned out manipulation. And you have to be able to, as much as you're feeling great about it, and it's amazing, and it's exactly what you wanted. If it's real, it will survive you stepping back and taking some time and saying, okay, this is what we're going to do. We're going to slow this down. We're going to look into some things. We're going to take some time to actually get to know each other before we make all these amazing moves. And that will put a wrench in his plans because he needs you to go fast so that he can move on to the next one and the next one and the next one. Maybe, maybe it's not so bad to be dating somebody who's a little dull. Maybe you

could, maybe dull in the beginning is good because it sounds like they don't tend to project dull if they're trying to swindle you or woo you or sort of just get you under their power. Uh, so yeah. Okay. That's a good thing to look for. I mean, ideally hot, but dull. So consider that ladies. Uh, and we'll, we'll continue more of this in a little bit with Jim because we definitely want to know more about, I dating a serial killer who doesn't who wouldn't listen to that um okay so and by the way just because you're not a serial killer doesn't mean you're safe I mean psychopath sociopath these are all deeply problematic killing animals always deeply problematic and people women overlook it it's like oh what do you mean he killed the family cat oh but he's so handsome and he treats me so well. Ladies, pay attention.

All right, wait, stand by. Because I want to get to, I want to get back to Sniper and get us through that. So now we move on to the next day. And it takes us to October 4th. Another person is shot, though she survives. A 43-year-old woman, Caroline Sewell, back to Michael's, a parking lot.

She's putting her bags inside of her toyota minivan you can picture it can't you you know you can picture yourself doing this amazingly she survives but the dc virginia maryland sort of area is absolutely in a panic now i mean as we discussed and here's just a little bit of sound from locals at and around that time. This is Sot 5. I do walk around my community with a little more caution than I did before. They can't go outside. And the blinds in the schools are all closed. So it's very much a bunker kind of mentality, you know, feeling that they're experiencing.

As soon as people get home from work, they stay in. They're not going out. Even the restaurants are, there's nobody in the restaurants. Residents of Washington have faced an awful lot of stuff in the last year, from people flying airplanes into buildings to the anthrax attacks. We face, you know, crazy shooters most days of the year, at least the threat of it. So we're just trying to go along as business as usual. Yeah. I mean, easier said than done.

Yeah. That man was an anomaly at the time. And I'll tell you, both Tim, my brother Tim, who's also an FBI agent, and I arrived at that Michael's store at exactly the same time because it turns out that it is almost equidistant between our two houses. We literally pulled up. I look over as I'm pulling into a parking space. He's pulling into the one right next to me. And we ran up to the sheriff and we said, you know, how can we help? And unfortunately, I wouldn't say that the sheriff had been equipped or his department to handle something like this. The fact is that all these shootings the days before happened up north of Washington, D.C.,

and just touching into the north side of Washington, D.C. And now he goes 50 miles south of Washington, D.C. What the hell is going on here? But to me, the first thing that I thought was, hmm, kind of did all these shootings north of D.C., working his way into D.C., just touching into D.C. And then he jumps 50 miles south. Why is he avoiding Washington, D.C. and then he jumps 50 miles south. Why is he avoiding Washington, D.C.? Possibly because he knows he'd go head to head with the FBI and the other federal agencies in Washington, D.C. who have a worldwide network of agents and communication versus the small towns around D.C. that have access to D.C.'s news.

But they don't have the FBI. They don't have federal law enforcement. They don't have big city, big police departments. And so he's dancing around the biggest media circus in the world, but not dealing head to head with big law enforcement. So you're getting this picture of somebody who has some sophistication for sure. Exactly. This is not some bumpkin.

And is thinking about what he's doing and why he's doing it. So he's a planner. He's a manipulator. But Tim and I, we ended up finding out that the sheriff had let go um all of the all of the witnesses that had been there um did not take any names what and and did not do a canvas of the area for any forensics um actually the the media line that he set up had been about 50 feet away from where the van was. And what I did was I looked at the angle of entry because the bullet went through her and into the back of her van. And so I looked at the angle of entry and then I spotted a sign a few hundred yards away.

And I started walking off a grid to do a grid search of the area. This is something that I'm very experienced in and and i walked 87 strides until i found a shell casing from a 223 and that was the kind of weapon that was being used so although the the press were at 50 feet from the van this piece of evidence was 87 yards away. So we had to move the press back. So they're contaminating the whole crime scene. Well, they could have. But the fact is that this is why I think he chose small town law enforcement versus the big guns. And he was very smart to do that. And he would continue to do that, dancing back and forth, north and south, around Washington, D.C., and not in Washington, D.C., properly.

Can you explain more about the weapon? You know, in today's day and age, everyone's familiar now with AR-15, less so this rifle. Yeah. I mean, it's a.223. It is a very— Bushmaster? It's a Bushmaster.223. It's just—that's just a brand.

It's the same kind of weapon that an M16 would be. The shell casing is rather large and the projectile is rather small, which means it's going to go fast and far. It's an

accurate weapon. It's very easy to use. Semi-automatic? Yes, it's semi-automatic and it's basically the weapon. It's very easy to use. Yes, it's semi-automatic. And it's basically the kind of weapon that troops on the ground and military will use because it's so simple. It's very hard to jam. You could stick it in mud and pick it back up and still use the weapon.

And so it's a very reliable type of weapon and certainly functional for this particular type of crime. Troops use machine guns. This is not that. This is one pull out trigger, one bullet. Right. But so far, that's all he's needed. Yeah, yeah. I got it. One shot, one kill. And that is something that is really, up until this, it's very scary. Because it also tells us that this person really knows what he's doing.

Because in order for him to be invisible, in other words, nobody actually saw him pull the trigger ever. It means he has to have a really good sniper's perch. And since it's out in public in the daylight, that means he has some way of concealing himself. And of course, people started hearing, we started hearing about a white van who, that sped away from one of the scenes. Well, if you heard shots and you were in a white van, well, it's very reasonable that you might want to speed away. It's also very important to know that a white commercial van is actually the most common type of van used in small businesses.

And in fact, one of the cable companies the year before had sold off 1,800 of these white vans in the area because they were ramping up a new fleet. And so there were overabundance. And I think at one of the shooting scenes when one of the local police officers told my brother, yeah, we're looking for the white van. Somebody saw the white van. My brother said, okay, stop right here. We're at an intersection. I want you to count the number of white vans

you see right now. And it was nine or 13 white vans that just in their sightline right then. So somebody's always going to be searching for the white van. If somebody tells you to think about the white van, you're going to see the white van. I mean, I've told my my kids, like, as you get to be driving age or you're driving with your friends or whatever, do not park next to vans. Do not park next to a van. There is no point. There's no reason. There's plenty of parking spots. Just bad things happen.

It's just too easy for bad guys to reach out and grab somebody who's smaller, weaker, and take them. No question. It's good to be proactive. It's good to be situationally aware. And in this case, what ends up happening is that the sheriff, when I went back and talked to him and I said, what have the people said? Because Michael's is literally in the parking lot of what's called the Spotsylvania Mall. And I looked around. There were at least 3,000 cars visible to me at that time. And I said, what witnesses?

What have they said? And he said, there were no witnesses. So I sent them all home. And I said, come on, somebody, somebody must have said something. And he said, well, there's this sent them all on and i said come on somebody somebody must have said something and he said well there's this one guy but he's 18 years old and he uses drugs and he's lied to us before and he said uh what and i said what well what did he say he said uh he said it was a black guy with an Afro peeled out in a dark sedan. And I said, great.

Did you put out an APB on it? He said, no, I put out the APB on the white van, just like Chief Moose told us. Wow. And I just, you know, took in a deep breath. But I also clocked it. Now, this is an unreliable witness who has lied to the police before, who's a drug user. But it could be something. Why would he lie about this? Yeah, it could be. And the other thing is, our viewers may not, maybe they do remember, but we didn't have cameras everywhere back then. This was immediately post

9-11. It would take a while for that apparatus to get up at every corner of America. It wasn't there yet. And not only that, this was a very rural area. This is Fredericksburg, Virginia. In fact, it's Spotsylvania County, Virginia. And it's a tiny little area that happens to have some box stores and a mall. But it's generally, it's just a very suburban, 55 miles away from Washington, D.C., kind of quiet little bedroom town. And nobody expected it. The iPhone didn't come out until 2007 as well, so people weren't popping open their phones

and getting the immediate aftermath. Sometimes it bears reminders, you know, about how we used to live versus now and these things that we've just become accustomed to. Right, right. Yeah, we were using pagers in the FBI at the time. Okay, so the next shooting, and thank goodness this person survived, was of a child. A 13-year-old shot, critically wounded, outside of the Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Maryland.

So he was shot in the chest, but he survived. He would later testify at one of the trials. And two days later, on October 9th, 2002, keep in mind, again, this started, as far as we know, on October 2nd. So here we are a week into this. A tarot card is found near the scene of that shooting at the school. And this is a, I would say, first big clue. No? Absolutely. Well, the first big clue about that is that this was a response to a lot of the unfortunate statements that police and political figures in the area were making at the time. We told them that the sniper has a God complex. And the last thing you

want to do is challenge that sniper. What you want to do is appease them. And then hopefully they will sort of lower their aggression and actually start communicating. Instead, what happened was the chief, chief Moose made a statement that the streets are safe, the schools are safe. So to prove them wrong after they called the sniper a coward, going after unarmed people, all this other stuff, person after person was paraded in front of the cameras saying that they wanted to to make a statement. And what they did was they shot somebody on their way into school, this 13-year-old boy. And like you said, luckily, he survived. And when they did the search, they found the sniper perch in a point was the statement on the top, call me God. And this confirmed, and I think finally Chief Moose listened to us about this sniper. It's the death tarot card and it says, call me God on it. And then on the back it says, this is for you, Mr. Police.

No press. And call me God again. And this was a very interesting thing. And as we began to really crunch all this data that we were getting, the information from all the shootings that happened in one day with one shot, one kill. The fact that he's bouncing around to these small jurisdictions. The fact that nobody has actually seen him. The fact that everybody's chasing ghost white vans. The fact that he communicated with us saying, call me God. And the fact that he said,

this is for you, Mr. Police. Well, that really raised some issues with Jim Fitzgerald, who was my buddy in the behavioral analysis unit and who had started forensic linguistic profiling. And that is using the actual content of the words, the construction of the language to tell a lot about the writer. And what we found was a great amount of detail that we would start to think about, but we didn't actually have sort of a sit down, drag out profile session until a few days, several days later. So the tarot card was big, but the focus on the white van would continue. For example, the same day the tarot card was found, October 9th, another shooting.

Dean Harold Myers, 53, of Gaithersburg, Maryland, killed while pumping gas at a station in Manassas, Virginia. A white minivan seen in the area is first thought to have some connection with the shooting later cleared by police. October 11th, 2002, Kenneth Bridges, 53, a Philadelphia businessman killed at an Exxon station just off I-95 near Fredericksburg, Virginia. Police enforce a huge roadblock trying to find a white van-like vehicle with a ladder rack on top. Sorry, go ahead, Jim. And let me tell you something about that. That was Massaponix, Virginia. It's the exit just south

of Fredericksburg, Virginia. So just south of where the Michaels shooting happened, this one exit down the road. My brother was one of the first law enforcement to show up at that scene. And as soon as he got there, he called his wife. They lived, as I said, just not a short distance away. And he said, stay inside, whatever you do, don't come out here. And she said, I just left that very gas station. And she literally had the receipt from pumping gas literally 10 minutes before the shot was fired there. Now, fortunately, she was in a big white van, but it was one of those big 15 passenger white vans that stands taller than she is. So a sniper would never have had a shot with her standing next to that van.

It was very fortunate. But unfortunately, the man who did stop there, he literally stopped there because he didn't want to have to... He was driving up to Philadelphia, I believe. He didn't want to have to stop anywhere near DC because of the sniper. He said, I'll fill up my tank here and then I'll be able to drive the rest of the way to Philly. He was actually on the phone with his wife telling her that when he was shot and killed. Oh, poor guy. It's just a terribly tragic story. And this is another reason why the whole thing was so disconcerting is,

and I talked about this with our guest on the Zodiac killings, in which the people, there seemed to be no motive. You know, the Zodiac killer didn't steal purses or wallets or commit sexual assaults it just seemed to be killing for fun and so it was like those are especially disturbing because we like to believe we can find patterns that we can then avoid that will keep us safe you know i think it's just a psychological psychological crutch and this is similar it's lacking any crutch for any sane person to try to use because this could have happened to anyone a child near a school a person pumping gas a person getting groceries a man walking down the street it's like the liquor store the parking lots there's

just no stopping anything you did in public was was risk. Anything you did. And as I said earlier, people were literally putting up blankets over every window in their house. They were afraid not only of going out in public, they were afraid that since so many people were off the street, that the sniper was going to start shooting people in their own homes. It's a very effective tool. When you randomly kill people at will with nobody being able to identify you or stop you, the terror level just kept rising over these 23 days. It just became unbelievably scary just to live and operate in that area. My brother, to his credit, he ran the SWAT team at the Washington field office of the FBI. He had all his SWAT team members out patrolling the area because he started, we helped him kind of profile the kinds of places that these shootings were taking place.

They were all near good avenues for egress, a highway nearby so they can get away fast. That was important to the shooter. So he was driving around to small towns, exits around big highways so that he could try to interdict. And unfortunately, um, he was, he actually heard the shot at the Home Depot. And I think that's the next shooting. Your brother did, Tim? Yes, Tim did. And he was the first law enforcement to arrive at that scene. Oh, my God. And unfortunately, it was an FBI employee that had been shot and killed. Yes, yes. Okay. And that was a woman, right? That was Linda Franklin, 47, Arlington, Virginia. This is the 11th victim, though not yet fatality because two of the earlier folks survived.

She was shot and killed by a single gunshot in the Home Depot parking lot in Falls Church, Virginia, an FBI intelligence analyst. And I knew that you and your brother were working this case, but I did not know that he was the first on that scene, which must have been horrific. 47 is not old. And to have it turn out to be someone who's essentially a colleague, even worse. And he just describes seeing her husband holding her and her dying in his arms. And it just he just describes, you know, seeing her her husband, you know, holding her and her dying in his arms. And it just was horrific. And this really got him even more riled up. And he knew that that this was a very sophisticated killer. And we had been talking throughout this whole process. And at about this time, we decided we need to really do a push to try to gather all this information and get it out to all the law enforcement agencies in the area. that the Ashland shooting happened. That was even further south away from D.C.,

about halfway between Fredericksburg and Richmond, Virginia. So that was October 19th. That was October 19th, 2002, five days after Linda Franklin. Is there one in between there? I can't remember. So there's two more, and after Linda Franklin, 47, was killed. Five days later, October 19th, Jeffrey Hopper, 37, shot in a parking lot at a Ponderosa Steakhouse. To me, that is just so- That's the one in Ashland.

Yeah, that's the one. He did survive. He survived. But, you know, the Ponderosa, God, we all grew up going to the Ponderosa. It's just like these things that are Americana, you know? There's something about it that's just, it shakes you to the core the doctors were able to remove the bullet from from jeffrey hopper during surgery and connect it to the others uh the ballistics coming back from the other victims and amazingly he did survive the final victim was october 22 2002

bus driver conrad johnson 35 oxon hill maryland shot while just standing on the top step inside of his commuter bus in aspen hill maryland He would later die. He was the 13th person known to be shot by the DC sniper. Again, three of those survived, 10 were killed. Go ahead, Jim. So what happened was that when the shot happened, I was actually in, when the shooting happened in Ashland, Virginia, I was actually in Richmond, Virginia at the happened in Ashland, Virginia, I was actually in Richmond, Virginia at the time. So I came up, my brother got to the crime scene before I did. And he, he found, uh, I'd say a situation in great disarray. And what he did was he was working with the FBI's human scent recovery dogs. Um, and were specially trained to pick up the scent and actually follow the path most recently taken by that human if they're in this area. And it's an

amazing program, but it would take me many hours to actually explain all the things they did. But when my brother arrived, all of the searchers were going in a particular area because the victim said I heard the shot and it came from that direction and when Tim when they presented the scent pads from the the tarot card that had been found and also some of the shell casings that had been found, they, they were able to, uh, they, they got a scent and their dog said that it was in the opposite direction. And all the cops said, nah, it's not that way. This is the way the victim said it came from. And Tim knew that the guy was standing next to a brick wall. And the echoes that you can get off a brick wall of a shot can make it sound like it comes from anywhere.

And so the dog takes off in one direction. As soon as they break the line of the woods, he sees an area where it's laid out. The leaves are all crushed down like somebody was laying there. And he shines his flashlight up and they're tacked to a tree is a little baggie, like a Halloween baggie with some pink lined notepaper in it. And he says, well, obviously they left us another message. Unfortunately, there was a big argument about whether or not they should open this thing. But Tim said, I can read through it. And it says. The streets are not safe, your children are not safe anywhere, he said,

there's a threat in this, we need to open it now, we need to get this out to the public. And because it was in a small town and they didn't know who should be in charge, they decided to hold on to it. It was it late, late, late into the morning, and they wanted to wait till the bosses weighed in. So they did not open it in time to get the call that came into that Ponderosa at the pay phone right at the front door. That was ringing while they were still on the scene at six o'clock in the morning and nobody answered the phone. So it was an attempt by the sniper to actually communicate with law enforcement. It's a missed opportunity and there would be others, let me tell you. But the thing that we knew from this letter, when we finally got it open and we read what was going on. We saw a huge dichotomy between the actions,

the planning and the execution of the shootings, and then these communications. And you can see it right now. There are those little stars on it. This is the cover sheet to the letter that you just referenced. Let me just set it up. The cover sheet reads, for you, Mr. Police, call me God, in quotes, do not release to the press. Keep going, Jim. Yeah. And you can see there's stars on it. Like, like this was a kindergarten, uh, you know, homework assignment that was handed in and done well. So the teacher put little stars on it. That's what it looked like. It was very immature and childish. So when we get into the profiling room and we're around our table and we're all arguing about this case and trying to figure out who this sniper is. We we had definitely nailed down that this is a very experienced and sophisticated person who's probably now we're thinking in his early to mid 40s, who is police or military trained, police or military experience,

who is on a mission. Like he literally has a very specific mission and he's carrying it out flawlessly. Nobody has seen him yet. And so we kind of nailed those aspects of the profile. And Jim Fitzgerald says, guys, I understand exactly what you're saying. And and I agree with you. But here's the problem. When this guy's communicating with us. I got to say he's he's immature. He says this is for you, Mr. Police, as if he's looking up to the police. He's writing on, you know, basically on on kids school paper and he's putting stars on it. What kind of self-respecting 45 year old man is going to do this if this guy is an adult? He's just barely adult. But I'm I'm thinking he's younger. This is what Jim Fitzgerald says. And everybody's like, no way. That's not possible. It can't be somebody who's this sophisticated can't be that young there's no way it's not possible for them to have done this

without police military training and experience on the line of fire and so i said look then we have one of two possibilities here either we have a situation where we have a 45 year old man who's incredibly experienced who's incredibly great at planning and executing these shootings, but he decompensates when he's communicating with us. And he acts like a teenager. Or for the first time in US criminal history, we have a sniper team and everybody blew up. No, snipers don't play well with each other. They don't. They work alone. Every case in history so far has been like this. You're a fool if you think it's otherwise. And Fitz chimes in. He says, well, it would make sense because I'm telling you, whoever wrote this

is like a child. How can he be so sophisticated and be a child? And everybody's telling me it can't happen. And I said, well, it could happen if you have a 45 year old and you have a 15 year old and the 45 year old is controlling the 15 year old. You said that at that point. Yeah, I did. And I said, in my mind, the way he could control him best is to totally control him by sexually victimizing him. And everybody says, oh, you're an expert in that field. That's why you think that's happening. They didn't believe it. And I started talking them through it. And I started saying how this is a possibility. And in fact, I convinced them there was a probability. And we actually put it in the profile at that point. Totally unconfirmed until 11 years later. But- Well, that one piece of it, but the rest of it would be confirmed within days.

Oh, yes. Right. But the part of it about how. How these two snipers for the first time in U.S. history were willing and able to work together. One was training the other, it turns out, and Mohammed was sexually abusing Malvo basically from the beginning. It was unfathomable, even to these FBI experts. It took a profiler like you to say, trust me, this is a real possibility we need to be taking seriously. And yeah. And can you just, can you speak to also too, because the other clue that was in this, this letter was that phrase, Mr. Police, you spoke to how it suggested he was young, but it suggested something else as well. Right. And another thing that Jim Fitzgerald brought up

was the fact that the tarot card plus the phrase Mr. Police, he said, Mr. Police is actually a phrase used a lot. It's a disrespectful thing, but it looks polite. It's used a lot in Jamaican reggae songs. So he said, I'm feeling like there's a Jamaican or Caribbean influence in this writer's life. He said, I can't say for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is a Jamaican American or African American who has Jamaican roots or Caribbean roots. And I said, you know, back at the Michael's store shooting, the one eyewitness that the sheriff told me about, who he thought was a liar because he was a drug user and had lied to the police before, he said, it was a guy with a big Afro, a black guy who peeled out in a dark sedan. We need to change this profile from a white van, work van, to a dark sedan. And we're probably looking for two African-Americans with some tie to the Caribbean. And that changed everything. Now you've got a different profile. And as it would turn out, you got the right one,

but you don't have the guys and you don't have the right car. And still there's- We don't know which car it is. We just have a general feeling. And it turns out, as they went back and interviewed people who were around the neighborhood of the first two or three days of shooting, one of them had also seen not a car racing away from the scene, but a dark sedan slowly pulling away from the scene. That is a smart tactician. That is somebody who knows that racing away is going to raise the awareness and set off the alarms. But slowly driving down a neighborhood street, it probably isn't going to really stand out in anybody's mind. And so- How did we get from that point to just a few days later, the final victim was shot on October 22nd. And within 20, within 48 hours, there was an arrest. And in between, I should say this, here's, you mentioned Chief Moose. I mean, right around that time, right before the capture, he had this message for the community which still sounded rather scary this is soundbite one the person or people have demonstrated a willingness and ability to shoot people of all ages all races all genders and they've struck at different times of the day, different days, and at different locations.

We recognize the concerns of the community and therefore are going to provide the exact language in the message that pertains to the threat. It is in the form of a postscript. Your children are not safe anywhere at any time. My God, the thought of hearing that. Yeah, that would be pretty scary. And if you notice the person standing behind Chief Moose at that moment, I believe was an FBI agent. And what he said was basically exactly what we recommended that he say. And I think my brother had a great deal to do with the fact that that line came out because he was very, very adamant that people should know that the children of this community are being, of the entire area,

are being threatened by these guys so that they would protect their kids so that we wouldn't put kids in harm's way. And what happened was they wanted to just hide the fact that there was a direct threat in the letter. But we said it will actually appease the shooter if you continue his line of communication. If you put it out there, he knows it's going to scare people. He will feel good about it. He might calm down. Because we showed the cover sheet to that letter left by the Ponderosa, but the body of it,

per CBS reporting at the time, the body of it read, it included a demand for $10 million, giving the 16-digit account number and a pin that was from a stolen Bank of America platinum credit card. And it included the chilling postscript, quote, your children are not safe anywhere at any time. So, yeah. So the threat had been made and now Chief Moose was listening to you.

It's pointless to go out there and tell the community that they are safe and that you've got it under control. A, it's not true. And B, it's provocative to the sniper. Absolutely. And so what happens at this point is that, and this is something we were trying to encourage. We were trying to encourage communication from the sniper or snipers at this point. And what happened was they called the, excuse me, they called the hotline and very unfortunately, um, when they called, they said, call me God. And people on the task force

who took that call thought that it was just somebody gaming them and scamming them. And, uh, they actually hung up the phone. They called back again. Uh, they actually wrote about this and that note, um, it was very unfortunate. Uh, but eventually one thing that they did was voice message on that priest voice recording phone recording answering machine sorry voicemail it's been so long it's been so long i couldn't even remember anyway on his answering machine and and in that they said you should look what happened in, and I'm trying to remember the name of the town. It might have been Arlington. Where was that shot fired through the Apple, excuse me, through the Michael's store where nobody got hit? Yes.

Hold on a second. Wasn't that, that was Michael's's in Aspen Hill, Maryland. All right. I'm talking about. Yeah. Before that, there was actually a shooting in in Montgomery, Alabama. Montgomery. There you go. OK. Yeah. So that was one of the ones that we hadn't yet discussed. That was on the list. Right. Not attributable to the sniper yet. But but other murders were happening in the country at and around this time. And one of them was about to get linked in. Right. And so what happened was in the message that was left on this priest's answering machine, they said, look at the shooting in Montgomery.

And everybody there, because we were talking about the first days of shootings in Montgomery County, thought it was Montgomery County, Maryland. But somebody came up with the idea, hmm, maybe he's talking about Montgomery, Alabama. It could be. And so they looked to see if there were any unsolved shootings there. And yes, there was a store and somebody came in and picked up a magazine and then left. And then a couple of minutes later, a bullet goes flying through the window,

just misses a woman behind the cash register. And in that case, they picked up, they picked up a magazine. And let me just tell you, glossy magazines are the absolute best surface in the world for collecting fingerprints. If you touch that, the oils in your finger will interact with the, the, the photograph that's on the cover and it actually burns it in permanently, burns your fingerprint in permanently into that picture and if you've ever tried to that's why people who are trying to save magazines will put them in plastic sleeves so they don't get destroyed that way well they had a perfect fingerprint which came back to a 15 year old named malvo who they were then able to track to a relationship with an older male,

Muhammad, back in the state, who was from the state of Washington. And they found his car. He had a Caprice. They got his license plate and they went and the FBI went to his place in the state of Washington and basically did a search warrant. They found a tree stump in his backyard. They literally excavated the tree stump, shipped it to the lab within 24 hours, they were actually spotted by a trucker truckers actually chipped in and helped blocking off roadways and the escape routes so that they couldn't get away. And they were taken down without anybody, any further loss of life. Jim, why did they call that in? I mean, it was in a way a confession to say, check out the shooting in Montgomery. I don't know that they knew that they left a fingerprint, but they must have known it could potentially be tied to them.

He felt omnipotent at this point. He felt like there's no way. He felt law enforcement was so stupid they would never catch him. He was bragging. He was trying to get people to realize that he was even better and he'd done much more than they thought he did. And now it actually gets tracked back to a number of other crimes that occurred in a spree that had gone all the way across the U.S. where Mohammed was training Malvo how to kill people. Right. And that's the category that we left out of the initial discussion.

But I said it was at least 20 people that they shot. 13 we went through, but there were at least seven more in the month leading up to the D.C. sniper spree as he was training this young teenager. They met, as I understand it, in the Caribbean. Malvo's mother was not the greatest and somehow allowed him to be just kind of turned over to this guy. And Mohammed started training him to kill and Malvo went along with it. Right. Well, what ended up happening was it wouldn't really come out to 11 years later when Malvo spoke publicly. And he did this to his great, I don't know, detriment, because speaking about this in Jamaica, which is an extremely homophobic place to this day, they consider if you if you're a male and you're sexually victimized by a male, they consider that homosexual activity on the victim's part. I mean, it has nothing to do with the victim's sexuality.

It has to do with an older person taking advantage of a younger person. But Malvo came out and said that when Muhammad picked him up out of this shelter, basically he was homeless. His mother had abandoned him. His mother had abandoned him several times already in his life before the time he reached 15 years of age. And his father was completely absent in his life. He he Mohammed came in and said, I'll be your father figure. You know, I'll train you. I'll I'll make you a man. And he slowly was grooming him into this sexual victimization. And he was also training him to become a killer at the car, things would become much more clear about how's so big and it's a gas guzzler. What they did was they cut a little hole out in the back by the license plate so that you could basically fold down the seats and lay inside and stick just the point of the rifle barrel out of

that hole. And there was enough room for you to see the site to cite your target but you can also see how it would limit them from shooting very high or very low because you have a very limited uh entrance where the the the gun barrel could be protruding from. So most of the sound of the shot is going to be contained within that trunk. If they weren't wearing headphones in there, they would have blown their eardrums out if they kept firing that weapon in such a close space. But we understand that a number of the shootings were done by Mohammed and some of them were, quote, training shots done by Malvo. Wow. They may have been the ones that people survived because it's very difficult for us to think that that Malvo at such a young age would have been able to carry out the shootings

that happened in the beginning. And at least at least in in one of the cases we know that that somebody saw malvo driving away uh from the scene that was the uh spot's been in wall michaels and they also had he he's spoken about how he admits to killing people himself but he also says he was the lookout he would make sure that there was no one in the line of fire, not for that person's protection, but just so that they didn't have that many witnesses and it was a clear shot. So one would scout and the other one would kill. And they had done something with the back seat to make it possible, I guess, to lie down, you know, from the back seat straight into the trunk. So I assume on your belly, you can be in shooting position. Yes, absolutely. And but what was even more disturbing than everything that had come out was when we found out that Mohammed's actual motive, although he said what he was doing is training Malvo to be a killer and that he wanted to create a school for kids his age and he would train all of them and he'd form an army to just take over and fight the oppression

that he grew up in and that kind of stuff. That was all just garbage. What it actually was, was his wife had gotten custody of their children. He was pissed off and he was going to kill his wife so that he could then regain custody of his children. And what he did was he made this whole plan up so that he could kill a whole bunch of people and then shoot his wife as part of this. Hoping that it would just be seen as one of the random victims and nobody would suspect him. Diabolical. He would be awarded his children back. Here is Muhammad's ex-wife on how she found out that he was the suspect and what she thought.

This is Sot 3. The way I found out that it was John was when ATF knocked on my door and said that they were going to name John as the sniper. And so they asked me, well, do you think that he would do something like this? And I was like, well, I don't know. Yeah. I said, well, why would you think that? I said, well, he said he could take a small city, terrorize it. They would think it would be a group of people and it would only be me. I mean, I wonder, Jim, was did anybody ask her? So when we had a sniper problem on our hands, did you ever think that could be my ex-husband? I don't, I think in general people, when things, terrible things happen, uh, generally people in the community don't think it's going to happen to them. And we still feel like this distance, I think in this particular case, um, you know, I've

spoken to her personally about this. Um, I think she was, she was not at all, especially the white van of it and all these distractions that were out there. And since he didn't specifically tell her that he would be a sniper, but

he did say he could terrorize the town and kill a bunch of people and then kill her, and everybody would think it would be all part of that same plan. So I really don't believe that she knew. Okay. But I don't think she knew either. I just wondered if it occurred to her after that threat. How do you take a not well-treated, I guess, not well-raised, but not terrorist 15-year-old boy and turn him into what he calls a monster.

Malvo is still sitting in prison. I'll set it up with this soundbite from him. Not long ago, this is soundbite six. I mean, I was a monster. If you look up the definition, I mean, that's what a monster is. I was a ghoul. I was a ghoul. I was a thief.

I stole people's lives. I did someone else's bidding just because they said so. I mean, that is the definition of a monster. That was him speaking at the Washington Post in 2012. Yeah, I think what happened was a combination of, remember I talked about the genetics, loading the gun, personality, psychology, aiming it, and the experiences pull the trigger. I think in his case, because he was born in a situation that was not only poverty stricken, but he himself had been taken advantage of a number of

times and, you know, not just sexually with Muhammad, but other things that had happened to him. And he was basically booted from place to place and living on the streets, scrapping for himself. He didn't feel connected to society at all. And the fact that Muhammad was sexually victimizing him, which is manipulating him and grooming him both as a sexual abuse victim and as a killer, what he did was the choice of weapon, the separation between the shooters and the victims gave Muhammad the ability to tell, to teach Malvo that they're nobody. You don't know them. They don't know you.

There's no connection here. It's easy to do. And I think just it was a perfect storm, both the needs that this kid had and he had to have the potentiality. I don't know how much anger and rage had built up inside of him, but certainly being victimized over and over again by Muhammad and the same person that you looked up to, the same person that you thought of as a father figure because you didn't have one. This is what he was searching for in his life. It was a deadly combination.

My God, he starts hurting you and he starts making you hurt others. Here's a little bit more of Malvo recounting how it was that Muhammad took hold of him, Sat 7. He gave me his time. His time, that's the only thing we possess. And where we invested tells what we value. He gave me his time. He was consistent. Even though the consistency was madness, he was consistent. He gave me his time. Wow.

His time, Muhammad's time, ran out on November 10th, 2009 when he was executed by lethal injection. He declined to make a final statement. He was 48 years old when he died. He was 41 years old at the time of his arrest. And the courts and the legislatures, the Supreme Court, have gone round and round on the younger of the pair, on Malvo, because, well, would eventually rule that it is unconstitutional to, in 2012, they ruled to pass down mandatory life sentences without parole for juvenile offenders, that it violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual

punishment and therefore what to do with Malvo. So he'd been tried in a couple of different states and in Virginia, they did change the law to not allowing life without parole sentences for juveniles. So he can't have a life sentence without parole there right now. But if he were paroled from Virginia, then he would have to begin serving his Maryland sentence. And there's a question about whether he could ever get out or whether he would just be in jail in perpetuity because one state after the other would start executing their sentences against him. I don't know. You tell me because Malvo's attorneys right now are seeking sentencing release or release or release, which seems that seems impossible to me.

Well, I don't know. I'm not sure what's going to happen. I will say this. I mean, Malvo was pretty messed up at the time of his arrest. I've seen some of the art that he produced when he was in his cell. Some of his statements at the time were very, very negative. He had been really pushed over to the dark side. I mean, I'm not saying that he didn't make choices, but he made 15-year-old choices. And sometimes that

can be reversed. When you hear him speak today, he says a lot of the right things. He may one day be able to convince a parole board that he's been rehabilitated. Whether that's true or not, I don't know. But I do think that the way, at least the way the law is right now, if he does get released from Virginia, he will be serving time in Maryland. And I don't see that he'll be able to ever get out. Yeah. I think even our current soft on crime policies don't go to the likes of the dc sniper understanding of the two he was not the most culpable uh but you don't you can't kill and terrorize that many people and walk free again he did get married in prison it always never ceases to amaze me never ceases to amaze me jim these women who marry prisoners i don't know what you could do a whole profile on them i'm sure i could right this this woman she started writing to him

then she went in they said it was beautiful they were allowed to hold hands the institution was very accommodating his state prison in virginia um he's enriched her life as much as she has enriched his i mean i don't know what that says about her life. And one of his original trial attorneys comes out and says he's met the bride. Very impressive young lady, educated. Her eyes are wide open, close in age to Malvo, who's now 37. And they are, quote, soulmates, according to the lawyer. Well, I think there's a lot involved in that psychology, and it happens very often. I mean, it happened with Ramirez here in California. I mean, they made him into a rock star. All these women were literally throwing themselves at him. It was really... Wait, which guy was that? Remind me. Oh, the Night of his life. So you can

maintain this connection, have this proximity to fame, and yet not have the risk. So it's a very, very strange psychology that puts people in this place. But as you said said it happens so often and so many of these killers who i like to forget the names of actually end up getting married to to mainly women on the outside who who have this kind of complex yep it happened with uh with uh eric menendez too somebody married him i just get like these women who would spend their lives like that when you know it's not like every man's a peach but at least the ones who you know you can actually touch might be a more fruitful place to cast your your rod and reel um i don't i i don't have a lot of sympathy i have to say i don't think that they should let this guy out of jail i will say that

as now the virginia law has been soft, consistent with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, they're now looking at getting the sentencing release from Maryland, which would be next up to hold him. And we're told a decision in Maryland could come this month on that. So it's a timely discussion we're having. I don't think the odds are in his favor. I mean, Maryland is pretty blue. Even Virginia is these days, Maryland is pretty blue. Even Virginia is these days, but not that blue. And I got to leave it on this note, Jim, because you spent a lot of years at the FBI. I know your brother did too. Thoughts on the difference

then and now, the way we look at our FBI, the way America thinks about its FBI, you know, the partisan politics that have been on display out of that organization over the past few years. And I know you're retired now, but how you think about it? Well, I certainly still know a number of people who continue to work for the FBI. And we have sort of a lift serve that we correspond to all the retired agents together and, and to a man and woman, everybody's very upset with the image of the FBI now. And, and unfortunately some of the really negative things. I mean, I think the most horrific thing that, that came out against the FBI was, was the lack of involvement in the Nassar investigation. But I think a lot of

the political things that have happened are happening way, way, way up here. But the agents, the street agents, the people who dedicate their lives and careers and put their lives on the line, not the administrators, not the leaders of it, but the people who put their lives on the line. They have remained absolutely the same throughout all of this and they will continue to. And I think that's the saving grace for the FBI. You don't become an FBI agent because you do it for the money. You don't become an FBI agent because you're lazy and you can't find something else to do. The FBI picks, and I'm not trying to be self-aggrandizing here. I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to become an FBI agent and to work there for 22 years. But the FBI picks people. There are hundreds of thousands of people who apply to the FBI and not that many get picked up every year, maybe a thousand every year.

And and the fact is, there's only about 14000 agents in the whole country and around the world. So it's a very picky job and it's very difficult to get in. It's very difficult to maintain your job there. And part of that is the excellence that they demand from you. And I think that that excellence has not changed. And it is what's going to save the image of the FBI because literally the people who have laid down their lives for people in the FBI, and we lost quite a few agents in the last few years. Some of them were first responders on 9-11 and got cancer. And others, there were two agents that were killed in Florida just executing a child sex crimes warrant, search warrant at a house.

And it's just, it's a dangerous job. And the people that do it are good people. Unfortunately, I think when, when law enforcement officers or agents get involved in politics or political decisions, it can never go right. Yeah. It brings shame upon the whole organization. To your credit, I should point out, you obviously were an FBI supervisory special agent, a profiler, 22 years with the FBI, investigated all sorts of cases, bank robberies, serial killers, public corruption, sex crimes, abductions, homicides, on it goes. But there are only 25 profilers out of 14,000 FBI agents, and you were one of them,

very competitive. So to your credit, you had an amazing career with them and continue. And now, speaking about these stories you have a production company xg productions we talked about am i dating a serial killer which you can find on audible if you want to hear more about that a different host but she gets into it and then another one called best case worst case that's on spotify and apple and you're in that one and that seems to be kind of what what we're doing here taking listeners behind police lines giving them unparalleled access to law enforcement, looking back at some of the most memorable cases that they were on. Sounds like you guys got a bunch of episodes.

Are they out now? It says we have over 300 episodes. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. And basically, Francie Hakes, who's a former state and local and federal prosecutor, she and I host Best Case, Worst Case. We talk to cops and lawyers and related law enforcement professionals about their careers and what's the best case and kinds of cases that law enforcement has to live with, and also the kinds of people that make up law enforcement. There's 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States, over 500,000 officers and agents, and they're a very diverse

group of people, but only a few make the bad choices that make the headlines. The rest of them dedicate their lives, literally put their lives on the line, and many of them lose their lives over the course or get injured over the course of their careers. But they are a good group of people who are trying to do good and help people stay safe and stop crime. And that's a really laudable thing. And that's something of which the public needs to be reminded. Those of us on our own show have very close connections, family connections with law enforcement. Try to remember that in all of this madness when the reporting hits that's dishonest and

politically driven. Thank you for your service and to be continued. All right. Well, thank you for doing this. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. Wow. What a story. What a case. Thank you all for joining us today and all week. You can find more of our true crime content on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast for free and check us out on YouTube. Go over there and subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. And we would appreciate you smashing that like button and keep on coming back for more great content.

We appreciate it. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.